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A Light to Read By

‘Artful,’ by Ali Smith

“Clever” and “inventive.” Are these the two readiest adjectives that spring to mind when describing the fiction of Ali Smith? Certainly they are common responses to her work. But as understandable as this may be, I hope to convince you that neither word is quite right. One damns her with faint praise, while the other misapprehends what she actually does.

Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun-freak, an ontologist, a transgenrenatrix, an ypomonist — O.K., now I’m just making up words. Smith might approve. A wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious. And her new book, in which she tugs at God’s sleeve, ruminates on clowns, shoplifts used books, dabbles in Greek and palavers with the dead, is a stunner.

“Artful” consists of four talks Smith delivered last winter at Oxford University, the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature. But don’t slink off to the next review just yet; these are like no lectures you’ve ever encountered. Part ghost story, part love story, part mystery, part ode, they weave a narrative that feels more urgent, more naked than academia commonly allows. This is good. Good because exciting; it hooks us. And good because in taking this approach, Smith goes a long way toward restoring the arid subject of comp lit to its more rightful state, something vital and raw.

Fittingly, the book starts not with critical distance but within a story. On its opening pages a bereaved narrator addresses her dead lover while dragging an armchair across the room. She’s moving the chair because she wants better light to read by. Take note: we begin not with reading, but with disturbing the furniture. No small task, it leaves the narrator out of breath, the floorboards gouged and the rugs “all skewy.” Once settled into her new position, she declares, “Yes, the light was much better here.”

This is the gist, the pith of Ali Smith. She does not invent the new so much as rearrange the known. Often this entails flouting the rules: of grammar and spelling, of propriety and convention. And flout them she does, without apology and with a blessed disregard for neatness.

Photo

Ali SmithCredit
Sarah Wood

On the face of it, “Artful” is organized in suitably Oxfordian fashion. Its four sections are called “On Time,” “On Form,” “On Edge” and “On Offer and on Reflection,” titles you can intone with due solemnity while stroking an imaginary beard. But their contents are hardly what you would expect. First there’s that barmy narrator, yammering away to her dead lover as if she doesn’t even realize she’s supposed to be delivering a lecture. Then the dead lover herself emerges, her eyes black and empty like “cut coals,” and she’s weirdly disruptive: emptying a mug of tea on the floor, stealing things (the television remote, a pair of pliers, a little onyx owl) and — odder still — visibly crumbling, trailing rubble and grit in her wake and giving off such a smell that the neighbors complain.

What on earth has this to do with comp lit? Brutally, beautifully, Smith never explains. Instead, she forces us to experience. All literature should be taught this way. Reading “Artful,” we feel grief, bafflement, irritation, pleasure, amusement, helplessness and the joy of intermittent revelation. We feel what literature — or “Litter-­ature!” as Smith at one point gleefully riffs — having drawn from life, delivers to our lives.

The dead lover, who seems to have forgotten a great many words and whose own speech is speckled with gibberish, turns out to have been a scholar. Indeed, the very scholar whose uncompleted notes constitute the bulk of the book’s literary references, which are so copious and catholic it seems ridiculous to try to provide even a suggestion of their scope. Suffice it to say that they range from Ovid and Dickens to Saramago and Szymborska, all the way up to Beyoncé.

We learn the narrator’s own stock-in-trade is not books but trees (whose pulp is the literal stuff, the pith, of books), and trees appear thickly in this volume, whether the narrator is telling us how a broken apple tree may “right itself and have its fruit again” or recalling a story her lover told, about Cézanne throwing a painting of apples out the window, where it lodged “in the branches of a fruit tree.” Smith establishes these doubled pairs of the dead and the living (the lover and the narrator; paintings and trees) in order to explore the tension between them. “There’ll always be a dialogue, an argument,” she writes, between form and content, art and life. Then she questions whether such a dialogue is truly possible. “Maybe the languages of underworld and overworld can’t really meet.”

Later still, she suggests that the desire to meet is the seed of all artfulness, and some kind of meeting its inevitable fruit. “Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect,” she remarks of a William Carlos Williams poem. “This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage — as soon as you even attempt to engage.” In other words, though the languages of disparate worlds prove imperfectly compatible, our impulse to express, receive, share may itself construct the bridge we seek. “Art is always an exchange, like love,” she writes, and the exchange we desire isn’t limited to other mortals. In a wonderful passage on a Tove Jansson story, Smith says that “maybe all offering (and by extension the profanation we call art) is about the gulf between human and divine, and about getting some kind of attention from God, at least getting some kind of dialogue going.”

That last bit, complete with the slightly petulant “at least,” is quintessential Smith: salty, not overly optimistic, appealingly stubborn about going for what she wants. And what she wants, I think, is not to be hailed or derided as “clever” (is she intimating as much when her narrator at one point disparages the cleverness of “know it all” trees?). Nor does she aim to please. “Artful” is a difficult, demanding book, contrarian in nature, a meditation on time that sidesteps the linear, a disquisition on form that refuses to conform. Portions left me bewildered — although in books, as in friendship, that isn’t necessarily bad. A degree of incomprehension can be stimulating, challenging, an incentive to return. As Smith says, “We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.”

I suspect what the great rogue Smith actually wants is contained within a line she quotes from a sonnet by Michelangelo. “The greatest artist does not have any concept which a single piece of marble does not itself contain within its excess, though only a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.” To be, of all things, obedient — not to convention or expectation but to the workings of the mind and the burning need to discover, to meet. Here, as in all her work, Smith gives the impression not of inventing but of rising up to meet something that’s already there.

ARTFUL

By Ali Smith

Illustrated. 237 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

Leah Hager Cohen teaches writing at Lesley University and the College of the Holy Cross.

A version of this review appears in print on February 3, 2013, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Light to Read By. Today's Paper|Subscribe